Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have
to.”

Governments
The Examiner provided a twopart interview with Daniel Risascher, Office of
the CIO, Department of Defense, on open source at the DoD, while
Government Technology Magazine reported on how open source software and cloud
computing can save government money. Similarly, The UK
Conservative party delivered a paper on the future of open standards,
open source, SOA and cloud for UK Government, while it was
reported that Vienna to …

Yes, for OSS projects modularity is handy in terms of handling
contributions, but modularity may not be the best way to deal
with a problem in a certain market state and situation!

Research has shown (see, for example, “The Innovator’s Solution”
by Clayton Christensen) that the “integrated” region over time
actually shifts to a subcomponent of an original integrated
component that has since gone modular. An interesting
example of this for MySQL its pluggable storage engine interface
since version 5.1. MySQL is more modular now, but individual
storage engines are tightly integrated for performance reasons,
and in some cases they are even proprietary. …

Just a small tip for using Bazaar on OpenSolaris: set the BZR_SSH environment
variable to openssh if you don't have the Python module
Paramiko installed.
For example, in your ~/.bashrc:

export BZR_SSH=openssh

Could be useful if you're pulling MySQL stuff from Launchpad and use
(Open)Solaris. Could also be useful on other Unix-like operating
systems when the default is missing (Bazaar uses Paramiko as
default).

Guilhem Bichot has written an excellent article on Advanced Bazaar for MySQL Developers. In
addition of showing the most common Bazaar operations for
developers, Guilhem shows how to create a new feature
and submit it for review to MySQL.

The article is an practical introduction to Bazaar's advanced
features. After the basics, magnificently covered by Daniel
Fischer a few weeks ago, this article explains how to perform
high level development operations with Bazaar.
Bravo Guilhem! …

Launchpad,
the development framework created by Canonical, is
under constant development.
If you have never used it, have a look at Jay's getting started and code management articles about it. If you
know it already, you may be pleased to know that Launchpad
has a …

When Brian began the work on refactoring the MySQL 6.0
Server source code into what has now become the Drizzle
Project, a number of code pieces were removed, including some
major MySQL functionality such as stored procedures, server-side
prepared statements, SQL Mode, some legacy code, and a variety of
data types. The goal, of course, was to reduce the server code
base down to a more streamlined and eventually modular kernel.

Of course, that vision is great, but it's got some side effects!
One of those side effects is a dramatic reduction in the number
of test cases that pass the test suite in their current form, and
an increase in the number of tests that have been disabled. I
re-enabled and fixed a few tests yesterday, but as of this
writing, there are only 54 of 408 tests currently passing in the
test suite.

Attention MySQL engineers and Drizzle contributors: upgrade to
Bazaar 1.6.1 now to get some fairly massive performance speedups
for bzr branch commands. As I noted in my last article on
Launchpad code management, Bazaar 1.5 was having some performance
issues when branching large project trees such as MySQL. In the
article, I showed it was taking Bazaar 1.5 91 minutes to do the
initial branch. With John Arbash Meinel's performance patches,
the time to branch was cut down to 23 minutes, which is a
fantastic improvement.

In writing my last article, I mentioned working with
John
Arbash Meinel, one of the lead developers of Bazaar, in
attempting to diagnose and fix the performance bottlenecks
apparent in using Bazaar with larger, history-rich projects like
the MySQL Server. Well, after running some tests and building a
custom branch of Bazaar that John pointed me to, I am happy to
tell you that help is just around the corner. In my last article,
you saw that doing a bzr branch lp:mysql-server took 91
minutes. This was a significant barrier to entry, I
recognize. So, I think you'll be happy to see the results below,
taken yesterday using John's patched-up Bazaar branch:

In this second part of my Launchpad guidebook series, I'll be
covering the code management and repository features of
Launchpad.net. If you missed the first part of my series, go
check it out and get established on
Launchpad.net. Then pop back to this article to dive into the
magic of http://code.launchpad.net. In this article, we'll
cover the following aspects of the code management pieces of
Launchpad:

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